Costs and Cues to Code-switched Lexical Access

Code-switching is a common practice among bilinguals that seems effortless. It indicates linguistic competence in both languages, as bilinguals are able to uphold grammatical rules for this bilingual language mode while fluently switching at various loci in a sentence (Poplack, 1980). However, perception studies on code-switched speech have generally found that perceiving lexical switches incurs a processing cost (Soares and Grosjean, 1984; Li, 1996). This seems to suggest that bilinguals should slow down when processing a code-switch. How then are these accounts reconciled, and how do bilingual listeners manage the perception of a code-switch, a potentially difficult processing task?